Supermodels in the Math Department

April 02, 2007

math wins

WILMORE, KY—You’ve collected their trading cards. You baked them cookies and cakes. You bought replicas of their competition shirts. You carry your cell phones in duct tape cases like the ones they use for their calculators. You’ve even attempted to talk to them when they’re staring at their feet solving differential equations.

Now, you have even more reasons to be proud of your Asbury College Math Department. On Feb. 8-12, four Asbury College teams of three

math wins

students each committed their weekend to the Hamann-Ray Science Center to solve “real-world” problems as part of the math-modeling competition sponsored by Consortium for Mathematics and its Applications (COMAP). The contest results are in! Despite having an inexperienced team (only four of the 12 team members had played before), the College earned some of the best scores ever!

Four Asbury College teams competed, two in the math contest (MCM) and two in the interdisciplinary contest (ICM). The problems included: forming fair voting districts for U.S. House of Representatives elections, developing an efficient airline boarding/deboarding plan and improving the donor/patient matching system for kidney transplants to minimize patient wait time and maximize the chances of successful transplantation.

math wins

One MCM team and one ICM team scored a “Meritorious” rating, which means that their papers ranked in the top 13-16 percent of more than 1,000 teams competing worldwide including teams from MIT, Duke University and Harvard University. Another ICM team scored an “Honorable Mention” rating, which placed their paper in the top 60 percent. The final MCM team produced a paper that has been accepted for presentation at the annual meeting of the Kentucky Chapter of the Mathematical Association of America (KYMAA).

math wins

Asbury College has a significant string of at least one “meritorious” team for the past seven years. This year’s team worked very hard to keep the streak alive. This was also the first year that an ICM team scored “meritorious.”